One of the major advances in recent years has been the increased use of optical communication systems for carrying very large quantities of information with low distortion and at a relatively low cost over great distances. Optical systems are also promising for such purposes as computing because of the inherently high speeds at which they can be operated. For these reasons, considerable development work ha been done in making various photonics packages for use in such systems. Photonics generally refers to devices that share both electronic and optical attributes, such as lasers, which generate coherent light in response to an electrical signal, and photodetectors, which generate an electrical signal in response to light.
A fundamental problem in making a photonics package such as a laser source module is the alignment of a device such as a laser source module with an optical waveguide. Conventional packages for photonics arrangements are typically made out of variety of dissimilar materials, such as metal, glass and ceramic, and involve relatively complicated manipulation of components during assembly. That is, the assembly process involves moving the components in three dimensions in order to place the components in the desired locations; for example, alignment of a device to a substrate, alignment of a fiber to a ferrule, alignment of a ferrule to a package and, finally, alignment of the package to the device. These alignment steps depend upon fairly specialized, expensive equipment. Thus, it would be desirable to find an alternative mechanism for performing one or more of these alignment procedures.